Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Castelnuovo-Tedesco & Others: Violin & Piano Works

Album review

Behind his impish baby-face, Aleksey Semenenko hides a warm personality and an accomplished musical technique. Born in Odessa in Ukraine in 1988, exactly eighty years after the birth of David Oistrakh in the same city, he worked with Zakhar Bron, the great "manufacturer" of virtuoso violinists, who has given his life to teaching, and has taught Vadim Repin, Maxim Vengerov and Daniel Hope.
For his second album, Aleksey Semenenko has chosen a rather more varied programme, opening on Grieg's First Sonata and closing with the ineffable Fantaisie D. 934 written by Schubert in December 1827, just months before his death. It is a virtuoso, brilliant, work, and it demands great technical skill and endurance. As so often, Schubert uses a Lied (here, Sei mir gegrüsst), albeit heavily modified. The work met with a rather lukewarm reception when it was first performed on 20 January 1828. One critic wrote "here, the composer was quite lost". This Fantaisie strikes a joyful tone which is rare in Schubert's music; and it has been sadly neglected by chamber music, a gap now filled by this elegant interpretation by Aleksey Semenenko and his excellent partner Inna Firsova, whose piano part encounters the same difficulties.
Joie-de-vivre seems to be the unifying theme that ties this programme together, from the work of the 20-year-old Grieg to the studiedly jaunty and carefree piece from Schubert, by way of Rossini as re-imagined by Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Paganini. This cloudless sky is scarcely darkened by Piotr Ilitch's Melancholy Serenade.
© François Hudry/Qobuz